Remember those guys who claimed they could make "unlimited detail" in video games a reality? Well they came back with a new preview of the technology to drool over.

I predict Crysis 3 to probably utilize this tech., & my rig not to be able to run it.

Watch & drool:

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I realized while watching this that no one properly renders plants so they look realistic. In that each leaf on the vine looks perfect and pretty much copied off the other one. No new sprouts, no insect damage, no brown spots on the leaves or sun scorch. Grasses grow in monocultural clumps without other weeds or plants breaking them up, stuff like that. I realize that today's game designers are going to put more energy into making guns and soldiers and zombies and ATVs than realistic shrubbery but I think this is why I never watch this stuff and think "Wow, it's just like I'm actually in that forest!"

I realized while watching this that no one properly renders plants so they look realistic. In that each leaf on the vine looks perfect and pretty much copied off the other one. No new sprouts, no insect damage, no brown spots on the leaves or sun scorch. Grasses grow in monocultural clumps without other weeds or plants breaking them up, stuff like that. I realize that today's game designers are going to put more energy into making guns and soldiers and zombies and ATVs than realistic shrubbery but I think this is why I never watch this stuff and think "Wow, it's just like I'm actually in that forest!"

Well, in this instance you're looking at a demo built purely to showcase graphical power and detail, not creativity. It's kind of like critiquing a scale model of an apartment complex by pointing out how people could never live in such tiny rooms.

I'd like to believe we could realistically see these kinds of engines soon, but I seriously doubt we will. There are a bunch of flags in that video.

For one, they never tell you the specs (even relative) of the pc it is running on. Yeah, maybe they are getting 20 FPS. And maybe its using a rig with 4 GPUs. That's kind of a really important thing to specify.

Plus, they are getting 20 FPS. He mentions that newer versions are seeing higher, but doesn't really specify.

They ALSO don't demonstrate how it would be able to scale with systems. One of the really useful aspects of polygons is that their number and the textures on them can be reduced to lighten the load on your system. We've yet to see how that will be with a particle-based system. You can't just cut the number of particles, because they are integral to creating a solid image. That means that you'd probably need to create different models of everything to reliably allow for scaling according to power. That's at least tripling developer workload. Not to mention the fact that this would probably be more difficult to work with.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about all this, but it's what I suspect. That's not saying we won't see particle-based engines in the future. I just don't think it'll be the immediate future. Until at least lower-end gaming rigs (and the current gen consoles) can reliably support it at least.

It is a really neat video but like someone said it looks like something to excite investors. Remember year ago when VR was hyped so much? We can see what happened with it. If they can make this technology affordable and run on average PCS it could be great. If people have to have super computers and if it is overly difficult to program it might not go very far.

I don't even care about this. I wish half the time spent worrying about graphical fidelity was spent on graphical style.

You're talking about 2 very different groups of people.

Think about this: eventually the fidelity will reach a point where it can't progress further, then the artists will be completely free of limitations to do whatever they want with the style.

There are halfway points, too. I remember watching one of the dev trailers for Rage, and they were showing off their new modeling software that allowed their artists to "paint" texture onto objects in the game. The artists were taking 'rendered' scenes, and drawing on them to create the image that they wanted.

I don't even care about this. I wish half the time spent worrying about graphical fidelity was spent on graphical style.

You're talking about 2 very different groups of people.

Think about this: eventually the fidelity will reach a point where it can't progress further, then the artists will be completely free of limitations to do whatever they want with the style.

Oh, I don't think that the same people do both, that these guys are artistic geniuses who gave it up to do tech. It's that everyone seems to spend a lot more time worryign and talking about relative poly counts.

I don't really think freedom is the problem, to be honest. Lots, maybe most, graphically interesting games come from smaller studios.

Quote:

Cutting-edge graphics don't work in opposition to artistic style.

No, obviously not.

Edited, Sep 2nd 2011 1:48am by Kavekk

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